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Detroit Free Press Lansing Bureau

LANSING -- The Department of Human Services budget was bounced, cut, restored and still up in the air after two committee hearings in Lansing Tuesday.

Under the House Appropriations subcommittee version of the budget, more than 1,000 workers would be cut, the state’s three remaining juvenile justice treatment facilities would be closed and Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to put more social workers into struggling schools would be in jeopardy.

In the Senate, the budget passed unanimously by the subcomittee was more in line with what Snyder proposed for DHS: leaving mostly intact his plans to buttress child welfare workforce; keeping juvenile justice facilities open, although one received a $300,000 cut; and using federal funds to help pay for an emergency heating program for low income people.

The machinations over the budgets will end up in a conference committee where the legislators can reconcile the differences in the two bills.

“I wanted the House to do their thing independently from the Senate,” said state Sen. Bruce Caswell, R-Hillsdale. “Good independent thinking is healthy for the system. The good ideas will rise to the top, the bad ideas will fall off.”

On a 4-2 straight party line vote, the House subcommittee dealing with the Department of Human Services budget passed a fiscal plan that is $108.6 million less than Snyder’s proposed budget.

The employee cuts are necessary to get a better ratio of supervisors to employees, said state Rep. Peter MacGregor, R-Cannon Township.

“The administrator to case worker ratios are way to low,” he said. “When you start looking at the rest of the states. And we’re at 7 or 8 (employees) to 1 (administrator). I think that we have to have proportionate reduction in staff.”

The Senate version calls for 269 fewer caseworkers than DHS asked for, but the Senate also created a contingency fund that could be tapped if the DHS wasn’t meeting caseload goals mandated by a federal judge to improve services to children.

The three juvenile justice facilities in Escanaba, Grayling and Whitmore Lake would be shut down under the House plan, but would stay open under the Senate version of the budget. The Maxey Training School, the highest security facility for juvenile offenders, who get a $300,000 cut in the Senate budget.

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Also cut from the budget in the House plan are: 30 employees who work on permanent placement for children; a reduction of 223 full time in employees in local DHS offices; $6.2 million in funds for the Pathways to Potential program; $683 million in food assistance funds, which make 211,496 people ineligible for the program; $546,000 in disability assistance and $15 million in foster care payments, which would reduce the number of foster care cases by 550.

Changes in the proposed House budget include: $60 million for emergency heating assistance; $2 million for adoptions subsidies and $5 million for private child placement agencies.

House Democrats protested the cuts, saying it will endanger children and open up the state for more lawsuits, like the one the department is dealing with right now in federal court in Detroit.

“We can not afford to have any more children under our care killed, abused or neglected,” said state Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, whose district includes the home of Tameria Greene, who was stabbed to death by her mother after DHS tried unsuccessfully to have her removed from the home.

Ray Holman, a spokesman for UAW local 6000 which covers thousands of state employees, said the budget was “dangerous and reckless.”

“Things were just getting stabilized in the child welfare system,” he said. “But this budget is regressive and puts us in a place where children are going to be at risk.”

Staff cuts to caseworkers in the state’s child welfare system, a major responsibility for DHS, could put the state in front of federal judge again.

In 2006, New York-based Children’s Rights filed a class-action federal lawsuit. In it, the child welfare advocacy group accused the state of endangering children by trapping them in a system that failed to meet even basic needs. Ultimately, DHS agreed to a sweeping, multi-million dollar overhaul — still in force today and overseen by a federal court judge — that would, among other things, reduce caseloads in what most agreed had been an overwhelmed system.

“Reasonable case loads are absolutely essential to ensuring the safety of children in state care,” she said.

Officials in the governor's and DHS offices said they had seen the House budget proposal and felt it was part of the legislative process.

"The governor laid out the administration's recommended budget in February based on careful thought and analysis," said Kurt Weiss, spokesman for Snyder. "We understand that the Legislature also has thoughts and ideas. This is all part of the budget process. In the end, we have every confidence that we'll have a 2014 budget that makes sense for the residents of Michigan."

Dave Akerly, spokesman for DHS, said the House budget was a disappointment.

“The staffing numbers we put forward got us to a point where we were finally getting in line of having not so much overtime and people were going to actually be getting good service,” he said.

The DHS budget now moves to the full Appropriations committees in the House and Senate.